It’s official: I’m no longer an employee of RealNetworks, Inc.. I’m now starting a new phase, which is one where I’ll hopefully be a visible part of many other open source projects (e.g. I’ve already started poking my nose in on Mediawiki development).
I started at “Progressive Networks” nine years ago, on March 11, 1996. At the time, the company was just finishing up RealAudio 2.0, and was trying to solve “the firewall problem”, i.e. making it so that users behind corporate firewalls could listen to RealAudio. The “firewall problem” really isn’t solved now, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job, but somehow, that didn’t get me fired š
In the intervening nine years, I wore a lot of hats. Standards nerd (working on RTSP and SMIL), QA Manager, Developer, Development Support Manager. Watched the stock split twice, and then fall down to almost the same amount as the per-share cash in the bank.
It was a pretty amazing ride, but it feels good to be off for a while. People have been asking me if this is some sort of statement about where Real is at or where it is heading. Let me say for the record, no. Things are a little tougher than they used to be at Real, but there’s a lot of persistent folks there, so they’ll be fine. For me, it’ll be nice to think about things other than multimedia for a while.
Presumably, I’ll have more time to post here. We’ll see if that happens….
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